Escape Game

Someone just showed me this game and I spent over an hour trying to pass it ... it's a really fun yet simple puzzle game. You won't be able to pass it, even though I did. Neener-neener.

Rat brain robot

For some reason, using organic brain cells for computing seems creepy to me... self-aware computing, coming soon!!

The Forgotten Bach

The Bach family was full of composers, but PDQ was an embarrassment!

George Lucas in Carbonite

I'm afraid George Lucas has recently been frozen in carbonite . . .

Content and creativity

In my Blather blog, I recently mentioned that Pixar is one of the only animation studios that seems to deliver a solid story time and time again, while other studios don't seem to have such success.

In this article Russell smith says:

I have heard people who work in entertainment industries - record labels, cable-TV chains - plan new entertainment products. I have been privy to conversations about platforms and demographics and advertising opportunities that mention "content" as a necessary afterthought. "Of course," I have heard people say, "we'll have to have some really top-level content as well. We have someone who can handle that."

Most of these discussions are about new websites or Web magazines. They are conceived as platforms for advertising. You think up a target market first, then you think up a look or style you think they will appreciate. There is a lot of describing the ideal consumer for this advertising: He or she lives in this part of town, drives this kind of car and has these products in his bathroom. Printed proposals for new magazines or TV shows often have pictures of these fictitious people - usually, amusingly, cut and pasted from advertising in other magazines.

What he says does not seem far-fetched at all, does it? Is it any wonder not many other studios can match Pixar's goodness?

"Content" should not be the afterthought, should it? Shouldn't it be the starting point for everything else?

USB Popcorn Machine

USB Popcorn Maker - Watch more free videos

Mmmmm... delicious... I could use one of these.

"What We Say Without Words"

I thought this was cool... a little slide-show illustrating of how the motions of our feet, arms, and hands can reveal our inner feelings.

"Man sues church over God injury"

According to the article:

A man said he was so consumed by the spirit of God that he fell and hit his head while at a Knoxville church.

Now he wants Lakewind Church to pay $2.5 million for medical bills, lost income, and pain and suffering he said he's endured from his injuries.

I'm not sure it was the spirit of God that consumed ya there...

Wordle.net

This web thing is pretty cool... it allows you to put in a bunch of text, or an rss feed, and it creates the word map thingies... here's a wordle from the rss feed of my Blather blog:



Cool, no?

New hand-eye relationship?

According to this article:

humans more thoroughly inspect objects when their hands are near the object rather than farther away from it. They posit that this processing exists because humans need to be able to analyze objects near their hands, to figure out how to handle them or to provide protection against them.

...

Not only do we see items differently when our hands are near them, we also process the meaning of language differently, Abrams said. Other experiments showed that when reading nonsensible sentences, subjects were less likely to realize that the sentences were illogical when their hands were near the display. This means that humans are less likely to recognize errors when we are holding the something we are reading.

Wanna be an artist?

Of course you do!

Someone posted this on a music forum; I thought it was hilarious...

Cultivating Creativity

Here's where those creative juices come from:



Yep, it's that simple!

Easy music game

Here's an easy and quite relaxing music game... might just fall asleep while playing.

Photosynth Demonstration

This is a bit old... from June '07, but I just now saw it (because of Digg). I don't think I need to say much, just check it out... pretty darn cool, eh?



As I said, it's from June '07, and this technology still isn't on my desktop, so there are obviously still things to work, no?

Lego boulder rolls, crashes

Here's a big boulder made out of reportedly 5 million Lego pieces. It chases a guy playing Indiana Jones down a street before hitting a car. How exciting. It could have been worse. Someone could have been killed. Tsk tsk!

Retraining your brain

According to this article:

it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

Interesting article that encourages the trying of new things... I can't really think of anything new to try though... hmmmm...

Magnet turns off brain

Or at least a part of it...

Words failed me. I stuttered as Prof Vincent Walsh turned off the speech centre of my brain for a few thousandths of a second to demonstrate the power of transcranial magnetic stimulation, a popular way to interfere with the most complex known object in the universe.

Eh... don't get that near me please...

No email for 20% of US

According to this article:

Roughly one-fifth of all U.S. households are disconnected from the Internet and have never used e-mail, according to research firm Parks Associates.

...

Age and education are factors in this divide, Park found. One-half of those who have never used e-mail are over 65, and 56 percent had no schooling beyond high school.

That's a lot... buy computers people!

"TENORI-ON Product Demo"

That kind of looks like fun!

Science shows Republicans cause fear, disgust

Not really, obviously. Well, maybe they cause such things to you, but that's nothing an fMRI can prove with sloppy science... according to this article, some scientists concluded:

“The two areas in the brain associated with anxiety and disgust—the amygdala and the insula—were especially active when men viewed ‘Republican.’ But all three labels also elicited some activity in the brain area associated with reward, the ventral striatum, as well as other regions related to desire and feeling connected.” So the word “Republican” elicits anxiety and disgust, except for when it triggers feelings of desire and connectedness. The rest of the conclusions are similarly obfuscating.

Uh... not so fast! As another scientist says:

“As cognitive neuroscientists who use the same brain imaging technology, we know that it is not possible to definitively determine whether a person is anxious or feeling connected simply by looking at activity in a particular brain region ... a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible.”

...

there is the problem of reversing the causal inference, “where people see some activity in a brain area and then conclude that this part of the brain is where X happens. We can show that if I put you into a state of fear, your amygdala lights up, but that doesn’t mean that every time your amygdala lights up you are experiencing fear. Every brain area lights up under lots of different states.

Nice try, though! Yeah, surely those Republican-disgusted scientists had no political agenda...